Point of truth calibration for disease prioritisation-A case study of prioritisation of exotic diseases for the pig industry in Australia

Approaches for disease prioritization and decision-making in animal health, 2000-2021: a structured scoping review

This scoping review identifies and describes the methods used to prioritize diseases for resource allocation across disease control, surveillance, and research and the methods used generally in decision-making on animal health policy. Three electronic databases (Medline/PubMed, Embase, and CAB Abstracts) were searched for articles from 2000 to 2021. Searches identified 6, 395 articles after de-duplication, with an additional 64 articles added manually. A total of 6, 460 articles were imported to online document review management software (sysrev.com) for screening. Based on inclusion and exclusion criteria, 532 articles passed the first screening, and after a second round of screening, 336 articles were recommended for full review. A total of 40 articles were removed after data extraction. Another 11 articles were added, having been obtained from cross-citations of already identified articles, providing a total of 307 articles to be considered in the scoping review. The results show that the main methods used for disease prioritization were based on economic analysis, multi-criteria evaluation, risk assessment, simple ranking, spatial risk mapping, and simulation modeling. Disease prioritization was performed to aid in decision-making related to various categories: (1) disease control, prevention, or eradication strategies, (2) general organizational strategy, (3) identification of high-risk areas or populations, (4) assessment of risk of disease introduction or occurrence, (5) disease surveillance, and (6) research priority setting. Of the articles included in data extraction, 50.5% had a national focus, 12.3% were local, 11.9% were regional, 6.5% were sub-national, and 3.9% were global. In 15.2% of the articles, the geographic focus was not specified. The scoping review revealed the lack of comprehensive, integrated, and mutually compatible approaches to disease prioritization and decision support tools for animal health. We recommend that future studies should focus on creating comprehensive and harmonized frameworks describing methods for disease prioritization and decision-making tools in animal health.

The right strategy for you: Using the preferences of beef farmers to guide biosecurity recommendations for on-farm management of endemic disease

Effective on-farm biosecurity measures are crucial to the post-border protection of emerging agricultural diseases and are the foundation of endemic disease control. Implementation of on-farm biosecurity measures are contingent on the priorities of individual producers, which can often be neglected for other aspects of the farming enterprise. The on-farm approach to prevention of endemic diseases, like bovine viral diarrhoea virus (BVDV), is inconsistent between farms and it is not realistic to assume that farmers take an entirely normative approach to on-farm decision making. Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) has been used for disease prioritisation and national disease control in human and animal health; however, it is yet to be used as a decision tool for disease control at the farm level. This study used MCDA to determine the most appropriate biosecurity combinations for management of BVDV, based on the preferences of Australian beef producers. Beef producer preferences were obtained from an online survey using indirect collection methods. Point of truth calibration was used to aggregate producer preferences and the performance scores of 23 biosecurity combinations for control of BVDV based on four main criteria: the probability of BVDV introduction, the on-farm impact of BVDV, the off-farm impact of BVDV and the annual input cost of the practice. The MCDA found that biosecurity combinations that included "double-fencing farm boundaries" used in conjunction with "vaccination against BVDV" were most appropriate for management of BVDV in an initially naïve, self-replacing seasonal single-calving beef herd over a 15-year period. Beef producers prioritised practices that preserved the on-farm health of their cattle more than any other criteria, a finding that was persistent regardless of demographic or farming type. Consequently, combinations with "vaccination against BVDV" were consistently ranked higher than those that included "strategic exposure of a persistently infected cow," which is sometimes used by Australian beef producers instead of vaccination. Findings of this study indicate that the benefits of "double-fencing farm boundaries" and "vaccination against BVDV" outweigh the relatively high cost associated with these practices based on the priorities of the Australian beef producer and may be used to demonstrate the benefits of on-farm biosecurity during discussions between livestock veterinarians and beef farmers.